Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh seem to have made an interesting and very useful discovery. They think that thanks to a blood test, it would be possible to determine the patients at risk of certain infectious diseases.
Indeed, the researchers explain in the journal jama, that individuals with shorter telomeres (chromosomal ends) are more susceptible to infectious diseases.
The study was conducted on 152 healthy adult volunteers who were injected with a cold-causing virus by the researchers. 105 patients were infected with the virus, and 33 developed signs of the disease. 26% of patients had shorter telomeres.
Telomeres are a marker of life expectancy and aging. They could also be an indicator of a good or bad immune system, more or less able to protect against infectious diseases.
This study must obviously be certified and developed with a larger number of volunteers to establish an absolute correlation between short telomeres and the risk of infection.
